e of the distances, which we have taken as the distinctive
feature of the country, tending to produce the perfect light without
which no landscape can be complete. Therefore the red of the brick is
prevented from glaring upon the eye, by its falling in with similar
colors in the ground, and contrasting finely with the general tone of
the distance. This is another instance of the material which nature most
readily furnishes being the right one. In almost all blue country, we
have only to turn out a few spadefuls of loose soil, and we come to the
bed of clay, which is the best material for the building; whereas we
should have to travel hundreds of miles, or to dig thousands of feet, to
get the stone which nature does not want, and therefore has not given.

188. Another excellence in brick is its perfect air of English
respectability. It is utterly impossible for an edifice altogether of
brick to look affected or absurd: it may look rude, it may look vulgar,
it may look disgusting, in a wrong place; but it cannot look foolish,
for it is incapable of pretension. We may suppose its master a brute, or
an ignoramus, but we can never suppose him a coxcomb: a bear he may be,
a fop he cannot be; and, if we find him out of his place, we feel that
it is owing to error, not to impudence; to self-ignorance, not to
self-conceit; to the want, not the assumption of feeling. It is thus
that brick is peculiarly English in its effect: for we are brutes in
many things, and we are ignoramuses in many things, and we are destitute
of feeling in many things, but we are _not_ coxcombs. It is only by the
utmost effort, that some of our most highly gifted junior gentlemen can
attain such distinction of title; and even then the honor sits ill upon
them: they are but awkward coxcombs. Affectation[37] never was, and
never will be, a part of English character; we have too much national
pride, too much consciousness of our own dignity and power, too much
established self-satisfaction, to allow us to become ridiculous by
imitative efforts; and, as it is only by endeavoring to appear what he
is not, that a man ever can become so, properly speaking, our
true-witted Continental neighbors, who shrink from John Bull as a brute,
never laugh at him as a fool. "Il est bete, il n'est pas pourtant sot."

[Footnote 37: The nation, indeed, possesses one or two interesting
individuals, whose affectation is, as we have seen, strikingly
manifested in their lake villas